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Ideas for the GSoC 2013 on Buildroot

Improve support of ARM SoC multimedia features

Buildroot as an embedded Linux build system, has had support for the ARM architecture pretty much since its creation, and Buildroot is used by a number of companies and hobbyists to build embedded Linux systems that run on ARM platforms.

A number of the modern ARM processors (so called SoC, for System-on-chip) have advanced multimedia features, like OpenGL acceleration, OpenVG acceleration, accelerated video encoding or decoding features (either through dedicated hardware units or DSPs). For example, all the OMAP processors from Texas Instruments (used on the BeagleBoard, PandaBoard and BeagleBone), the i.MX processor from Freescale, the BCM2835 from Broadcom (used on Rasberry Pi) all offer such multimedia features. Using those multimedia features require specific libraries provided by the different processor vendors, and Buildroot is currently lacking packages to integrate those specific libraries. They are usually not trivial to integrate, because the libraries provided by the processor vendors often use uncommon build systems, have bizarre dependencies and so on. However, getting the support for those libraries in Buildroot is very important so that Buildroot users can fully benefit from the multimedia features of their hardware.